Interesting biographies to read

The Memoir: Part One by Cher

"There was some sniggering" when the news broke that Cherilyn Sarkisian – aka Cher – was going to publish a two-part memoir, said Hadley Freeman in The Sunday Times. While a president can get away with such a "power move", it seems less justifiable for a pop star "who once sang 'The Shoop Shoop Song'". Yet it turns out that Cher has led such an eventful life that two volumes may not be enough. She was born in California in 1946, to a heroin-addicted Armenian father and a singer mother who married eight times, said Barbara Ellen in The Observer. While much of her childhood was spent in chaotic poverty, there were periods of "wealth and plenty", depending on whom her mother was "married to at the time". Cher met her first husband, Sonny Bono, a songwriter 11 years her senior, in a coffee shop when she was 16. When he walked in, she recalls, "everyone else in the room faded". Having worked together as backing singers, they formed the singing duo Sonny & Cher, and in 1965 hit the big time with their "deathless global smash" "I Got You Babe", which knocked The Beatles' "Help!" off the top of the UK charts.

While Cher and Sonny had a "sizzling chemistry in performance", offstage he was an "old-fashioned, controlling" Svengali, said Alexandra Jacobs in The New York Times. A fan of Machiavelli, he worked Cher "like a pack mule" while saddling her with contracts that gave him ownership of 95% of her earnings (the remaining 5% went to lawyers). The pair reinvented themselves as TV stars in the early 1970s, making the hugely successful "The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour", but divorced in 1975. Covering the period up to the dawn of Cher's "serious movie career in the early 1980s", "The Memoir: Part One" is a "detailed and characteristically profane" examination of a fascinating and remarkable life.

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King: A Life
by Jonathan Eig
688 pages
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: May 2023

Jonathan Eig’s “King: A Life” was published early last year to nearly instant acclaim and was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Biography earlier this year.  Eig is a journalist and author previously best-known for his biographies “Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig” (2005) and “Ali: A Life” (2017).

Until now, David J. Garrow’s Pulitzer Prize winning biography of MLK (published in 1986) was widely considered the standard review of King’s life. Eig’s biography, however, is the first book on MLK built upon a towering base of newly released documents including thousands of pages of White House and FBI transcripts, oral histories recorded by MLK’s father and wife and interviews with more than 200 members of King’s orbit and inner-circle.

Although Eig’s biography is substantial, with 557 pages of text, it could easily have been much longer. But while ideal biographies are generally a judicious balance of colorful, eloquent prose and incisive, penetrating history, Eig has largely eschewed the former in favor of a searing focus on the latter: on King’s persona, the daunting challenges of his time, and the resulting cause-and-effect.

In this respect, Eig exhibits the investigative and analytical tendencies of a journalist rather than the literary inclinations of a poet. But King’s life does not easily lend itself to quaint scene-setting or mesmerizing one-liners; significant stretches of his life prove heavy and dark rather than light and uplifting. Eig is adroit, however, at magnificently capturing King’s very best, and his most dramatic, moments.

No reader will soon forget Eig’s description of the eighteen-year-old’s entrancing cadence delivering his first sermon, the utterly enthralling chapter devoted to MLK’s 196